


stay alive

by ninemoons42



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Angst and Feels, Cassian Andor-centric, Gen, Heavy Angst, Heavy Drinking, Rogue One - some of them live, Survivor Guilt, background cassian/jyn - Freeform, background rebelcaptain, partly canon-compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-11
Updated: 2017-01-11
Packaged: 2018-09-16 20:15:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9288011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: They've survived Death Stars and the war that spans the galaxy, but the missions keep on coming.When the inevitable happens and Jyn is laid up with serious injuries, Cassian decides that he's had enough and that it's time for him to drown his sorrows.Fortunately, before he can actually end up on a ledge, there is already someone available to talk him down from it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know why this was the story that popped into my head as a response to the song "A Thousand Years" -- yes, that one, the Christina Perri single. 
> 
> Sorry for the angst....

He had never much been one for any form of intoxicating spirits. It just wasn’t the kind of thing that he wanted, if he was looking to build a wall between himself and the many, many, _many_ screams he’d heard over the years.

Some of those screams were even his own, and how kriffed up was that, he wondered? But that was the life of a being who’d given up walking on the straight and narrow path, in order to hide in the shadows and do the unsavory things that were necessary, if a noble and great cause were to advance against any and all opponents.

The screams of those he’d killed, and those he’d left to die, and those who had thrown themselves in front of blasters and all the other weapons of the galaxy for his sake.

Kriff.

Cassian put the bottle to his mouth and suffered through another overly generous gulp, one that scorched as it went down his throat. One that turned itself into a terrifying weight in his gut -- and yet it still wasn’t big or heavy enough to distract from the sharp edges of his guilt. Years and years and all the missions, all the running from one dark place to another, all the hair’s-breadth escapes, and all the lives he’d left snuffed out in his wake.

It would have to be indifferent Corellian whiskey at worst, he thought, and something actively poisonous at best. He’d deserve it. Maybe. He’d deserve to die screaming, with every cell in his body turning itself inside out and mooring him on the rock-toothed shores of hideous agony, pain after pain lapping at him and burning his senses out one by one -- 

That was the sort of suffering he deserved.

Especially after that last mission.

He took another desperate pull, and he winced again as the whiskey overflowed and dripped onto his skin and it itched and burned at the same time. Skies above only knew what it was going to do to the rest of him, tonight and tomorrow, and he’d go and drink the karking bottle dry, if only it would mean that Jyn would wake up when the med droids were through with her -- 

Another swallow. He hoped this one would banish the sight of her, tottering back towards their shuttle with her own blood soaking into her shirt, crimson on the ragged armor she was wearing, only just held in by the bindings that she habitually wore around her own chest. Pale skin on which the trails of sweat stood out, glaringly obvious; pale skin criss-crossed with the myriad scars and slices of her vagabond life -- and why did Cassian keep forgetting that? Was he too caught between the opposing pulls of his guilt and the self-imposed righteousness that were the only things that kept him going, that it was always a shock to be reminded of what it meant for her to be wandering the worlds and systems all alone from sixteen onwards? Was he so blinded by his own devotion to the cause, that he forgot how she couldn’t have a cause when she was too busy struggling to survive?

He swore, quietly, in all the languages he knew, and the next time he took a long drink the bitterness of the whiskey was mixed with the salt of his own tears.

 _Someone, anyone,_ he thought, desperately. _Don’t listen to me for my sake. I can’t ask for anything for myself. I’m only asking on her behalf. She still needs to live. I still need her. I can’t be without her. I can’t survive alone. I can’t survive without her._

Blood on his own hands, blood that was Jyn’s own life, when he’d handed yet another battered data chip over to Draven and then run as though every stormtrooper in the Empire had been breathing down his neck. He was actually supposed to be debriefing, now, but he couldn’t remember the mission any more. Couldn’t even remember what it was that Jyn had risked her life for -- another anonymous data set, another stream of information. The Rebel Alliance would need that information, but it was completely meaningless to him now.

And why were they still the Rebel Alliance when they had, against all odds, _won_? When they had actually managed to defeat the Empire? What were they fighting but the remnants of the enemy?

There wasn’t enough whiskey in the bottle, or he wasn’t drinking quickly enough, but the feeling that there would never be enough spirits or drugs or pain to take away his guilt and his shame was an old, old weight strapped to his shoulders.

He’d been carrying that weight around right from the start.

Drink. Wince. Drink. Wince.

Weep. 

A brief glimpse of sorrowful milky eyes, and the phantom weight of a hand that was calloused from many years carrying all sorts of powerful guns. The tremulous whisper of a voice that no one else but he and Jyn could hear, alternating between prayers and the shaky repetition of the word _pilot_. The towering shadow of gangly limbs in too-long and too-scorched metal.

He was alive and he didn’t deserve it, and he would happily bleed himself dry if it meant she would live on, and he thought he meant it, despite the creeping haze of intoxication and the increasingly muddled shamble of his stuttering thoughts.

Footsteps, behind him.

He was too weary to turn around. Too weary to ask questions, when he was already too weary to lift the bottle to his mouth. But lift it he did, and lift it again, and again, because he wanted to drown. Maybe he needed it.

So he protested, slurring the words, when the bottle was taken away from him.

Blink. Blink. Who was it that was looming over him? Were they speaking to him? 

“Go away,” he tried to say, and tried to reach for the bottle again.

“This isn’t even any good. Why are you drinking it?”

A woman’s voice. She didn’t sound young at all. But when he blinked his eyes, when he fought through the drunk blindness, he was still looking at Leia Organa as she sat. Nowhere near arm’s reach. That was probably the smart thing to do. 

Still, he saw the sagging sallow bags beneath her eyes. Lines in her face -- no, they were gone, his eyes were playing tricks on him. How much younger was she, compared to him, compared to Jyn? And yet she had that same weary shadow lurking in her eyes. 

Alderaan, he thought, and wanted to weep again, and before he knew it she was offering him a clean bit of cloth.

He waved it away. Blew his nose on his sleeve.

He saw her briefly wrinkle her own nose in distaste, and muttered, knowing he could get tossed into the brig for his words, “Go away.”

“I came to tell you that they’ve just finished putting Sergeant Erso in bacta,” she said, and though he could see her he could barely hear her. It was as if she was whispering to him from two or three systems over. “The severity of her injuries will mean that she’ll have to stay in the tank for a day or two.”

“It should have been me,” he mumbled.

“As I recall correctly, she’s had more experience with stealing things.”

“If I had been any better, then I would have been the one doing the stealing, and she wouldn’t have had to get hurt.”

“If wishes were banthas.” 

He could hear bitterness in her voice, gravel around the edges of the words, rough and bruising, and he tried to focus on her.

“If I had been more convincing,” she said. “If I had been coward enough to give up the Rebel Alliance.”

“Alderaan,” he said, only dimly understanding.

“Yes. But that is not what happened. I am alive, and I must go on, because those who are gone are relying on me to go on.”

“The ones I’ve killed, the ones who are dead because of me,” Cassian began. Tears, again, and he was starting to hate himself. Not for crying. For leaving so many others behind. “I think they want me dead. I think they want me to suffer.”

“No doubt some of them do. But not all of them, I would think.”

“You didn’t know many of them, then.”

He thought he saw her shrug. “I know one of them. Ruescott Melshi. Do you remember him?”

Unbidden, Cassian thought of a face frozen in an attitude of grim resolve. He thought of a voice that was ragged with determination. He thought of shredded armor and a shattered helmet. “He died because he followed me.”

“He died because he wanted to make amends, and while it would have been better for him to have lived -- he died doing something that he chose to do.”

Cassian wanted to spit at her. “How do you know that?”

Quiet ragged laughter.

He ground his teeth and tried to stand. Tottered, instead, and tried to lunge for the bottle of whiskey. “Give it.”

“On your own head be it,” was the response. “That _is_ what you want people to tell you, isn’t it. You want us to condemn you. I don’t have time to waste on that. You’ll have to do it for yourself.”

“Yes. I do it. Every day. Every moment,” Cassian muttered, swallowing down another bitter mouthful.

“And when that gets you to your intended result -- when you die as you want to -- who will stand between the blasters and Sergeant Erso? Who will make sure that she stays alive? Who will defend her? Certainly not you. Is that what you want? A good soldier left alone without anyone to watch her back?”

“Because I’ve been doing such a great job of it!” 

The shriek of shattering glass.

Cassian looked down, dispassionately, at the spilled whiskey and the fragments of glass. At the slashed line of blood on his lower leg. 

“Medcenter,” he heard Leia say.

“Why am I alive,” he ground out. 

“Because you still have things that you need to do.”

He tried to glare at her.

“I did not say, because you still have to serve. I made no mention of the Rebel Alliance. I said, because you still have things that you need to do.” She was folding her arms over her chest. She was stern, and she was clipping out her words. 

“Like what? I have given my life to you, to the Alliance,” he said. He wanted to pace, and couldn’t. The deepening night was starting to spin, to his whiskey-bleary eyes. “If I left now, I would have nowhere to go. I would not know what to do.”

“Wrong.”

He rounded on her. “What do you even know?”

“What is more important,” she asked, calm and cold. “The pain you’re feeling now, or the possibility of losing the ones that you care for the most?”

“I have lost almost all of them!”

“Almost. That is the important word. There is one here who is fighting for her life. And perhaps I understand her enough to know that she expects you to be there when she wakes up. She expects you to watch her back. She expects you.”

Cassian stared, dumbfounded, as the image of Leia began to recede -- and then he made himself take that step after her, and another, and another, and he cursed the whiskey for making him walk too slowly, too shakily. “She expects me?” he asked.

“I should think she does,” was the almost compassionate reply. 

“You know this to be true. You have -- experience,” he said, trying to find the right words.

“Someone told me that pain can be useful, but not when it is dwelled upon. Pain, and anger, and grief. Better to make use of these emotions, instead of these emotions using you.” A small sliver of a smile, fleeting. “I wish I had listened to my mother more closely, when she was still alive.”

She slipped away from him, then.

Jyn was expecting him.

And he staggered as he remembered her whispering to him, the night before this mission: “Stay alive.”

She was fighting to stay alive.

Beneath his bloody hands, she’d tried to keep breathing. Tried to hold on to him. His hands shaking and almost tearing the bacta patches. She’d tried to keep her eyes on him.  
He needed to be there, to look her in the eyes.

He needed to be where she was.

Not here.

Not with his ghosts.

He turned his back on the night, and tottered toward the nearest door.

**Author's Note:**

> I am also on tumblr [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
